On Russia, China, and now also Mexico, Scott’s foreign policy is consistent — and it might impress Republican voters.
Tim Scott formally launched his 2024 presidential campaign on Monday with all the enthusiasm and affability the senator has cultivated in his years serving in Congress. Close observers of American politics have heard his inspiring story before, so the senator’s largely autobiographical announcement speech might have bored political junkies. But it’s likely that most Republican primary voters have not. And yet the senator did not devote his speech only to introductions. South Carolina’s junior senator courted controversy on foreign affairs, an area of policy-making where he is not well defined.
“Hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list are crossing our borders,” Scott insisted following his promise to “stop retreating” from the southern border. “Chinese nationals are flooding into Mexico to break in.” The terroristic threat metastasizing in Mexico is compounded by the growing menace represented by the illegal drug trade. “When I am president,” Scott added, “the drug cartels using Chinese labs and Mexican factories to kill Americans will cease to exist.” How, you ask? The senator answers, “I will let the world’s greatest military fight these terrorists.”
That’s ambitious. We can assume a hypothetical President Scott would not abrogate the Posse Comitatus Act, thereby limiting his capacity to neutralize the threats he warned are emanating from Mexico to military interventions taking place inside Mexico.
Scott is not a blank slate when it comes to border security. The senator has sponsored legislation designed to choke off the flow of migrants and narcotics into the U.S., and he has endorsed freezing cartel assets in the U.S. and imposing sanctions on those organizations. But Scott has not previously flirted with the prospect of using military force against criminal enterprises south of the border. Depending on how far Scott’s presidential campaign takes him, that could matter. At least within the Republican firmament, deploying the U.S. military against the Mexican cartels is a live issue.
Earlier this year, Representatives Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) and Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) introduced a bill that would have legally authorized the use of military force against assets inside Mexico — functionally declaring that the United States was “at war with the cartels.” For his part, Waltz said that an escalation along these lines is necessary to meet the evolving nature of the threat. “We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the Mafia,” he said. But House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCaul was not convinced. According to one staffer, the bill’s implications for “the bilateral relationship with Mexico” were a source of concern.
Rightly so. While the Biden administration has alleged that portions of Mexico have become cartel-run statelets where Mexico City’s authority is no longer recognized, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador disagrees. López Obrador further said that his government would not “permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene.” In the unlikely event that the U.S. took military action against non-state networks on Mexican soil without the imprimatur of the host government, it could begin to look a lot more like another Mexican-American war faster than anyone would like.
But Scott’s peculiarly hawkish policy preferences when it comes to the southern border are perhaps better evaluated as a political overture rather than a warning. Scott’s chest-thumping was warmly received by his audience, and it is likely to speak to Republican voters who’ve lost patience with half measures when it comes to border security. The prospect of military action against cartel targets inside Mexico certainly irritates progressives, and irritating progressives is one guaranteed way to endear yourself to GOP primary voters. Moreover, this new position inoculates Scott against the criticism that he is too hawkish for Republican base voters when it comes to another conflict abroad: Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Scott was among the many Republican presidential hopefuls who responded to a request from former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson for a statement regarding their views on that conflict and America’s role in it. Scott was unequivocal. He said that “degrading the Russian military is in our vital national interest” and that the U.S. should fund Ukraine’s efforts to do just that in their own defense. He dismissed offhandedly the myth that Washington is showering Kyiv with taxpayer dollars with no associated oversight. “There is no such thing as a blank check,” he wrote simply. Lastly, Scott warned that Beijing has chosen sides in this conflict, and keeping the People’s Republic of China in check will be more challenging if China’s junior partner in Eurasia emerges victorious from their war of choice.
Republicans with more nationalistic ideological inclinations are likely to balk at Scott’s preference for an extroverted foreign policy regarding Russia (seemingly, for that part of the Right, only regarding Russia). The fact is, Scott has staked out a hawkish foreign policy not just on Russia but also on China and now Mexico. No one can argue that the senator is ideologically inconsistent. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that Republican voters won’t like what they hear.